TCRA's Biometric SIM Registration — Tanzania Reused NIDA's National ID for 37 Million Lines, Without a Privacy Law to Match

Tanzania's telecoms regulator, TCRA, has required every prepaid SIM card to be biometrically verified against the National Identification Authority's (NIDA) database since regulations took effect in 2018–2019, applying the 'once-only' principle by reusing citizens' existing national ID biometrics.

TCRA cross-checks new and existing SIM registrations against NIDA's biometric national ID database rather than collecting fresh documents at every telecom shop.

According to Home Affairs Minister George Simbachawene's 2020/2021 budget statement, TCRA had registered 37,297,930 SIM cards through the biometric system by March 2020, while NIDA had issued 21,823,026 national identification numbers by the same date. SIM-registration demand pushed NIDA's own registration revenue up 177%, from a projected TZS 500 million to over TZS 1.3 billion. An independent analysis by the Institute for Security Studies (Gumba & Wanyonyi, July 2020) found no empirical evidence that compulsory biometric SIM registration reduces fraud or crime, pointing to Kenya's five-year experience where prisoners continued defrauding citizens using unregistered or irregularly registered SIMs. The same analysis found Tanzania's regulations lack supporting privacy legislation — including any procedure to deregister deceased users' biometric data — and that TCRA itself was struggling to enforce compliance, with penalties as low as a $216 fine or three months' imprisonment.

The case illustrates both sides of once-only data reuse: TCRA achieved genuine nationwide operational scale by cross-checking against an existing biometric registry instead of re-collecting citizen data, but the legal and oversight infrastructure needed to govern that reuse responsibly was not yet in place at the time of reporting.